WePay

Overview

WePay was founded in 2008 by Rich Aberman and Bill Clerico and joined Y Combinator's Summer 2009 batch.^[1] It began as a consumer-facing way to collect group expenses, experimented with group buying and mobile invoicing, then found its durable business as embedded payment infrastructure for software platforms.

That pivot produced the company WePay is remembered for. Instead of acquiring merchants one by one, it let platforms such as FreshBooks and GoFundMe onboard merchants, accept charges, manage risk, issue refunds, and move funds under their own brands. By 2015 WePay reported 1,000 API partners, more than 500,000 merchants reached through those partners, and more than $1 billion processed.^[2]

WePay did not shut down. JPMorgan Chase announced its acquisition in October 2017, closed the deal that December, and integrated WePay technology into merchant and platform products.^[3][4] The outcome validates a strategic pivot: WePay traded a weak direct distribution model for one-to-many platform distribution, then paired its developer infrastructure with a bank's risk capabilities and four million small-business relationships.

Founding Story

Aberman and Clerico initially focused on group expenses. The founders later concluded that money movement was the valuable primitive, while infrequent peer-to-peer collections produced weak engagement.^[5] They kept searching for a recurring commercial use.

In 2010 WePay launched GoingAsAGroup, a group-buying product that helped users recruit participants through email, Facebook, and Twitter and collect payment through WePay.^[6] In 2013 it released mobile invoicing for service providers such as contractors, photographers, tutors, and dog walkers.^[7] Both moves approached payments through an end-user application. Aberman later described the starting point plainly: “We didn’t think we were in the payments business at all—we thought we were in the app business.” He also named the retention problem: “How many times a year do you plan a bachelor party or rent a ski house with your friends?”^[5]

The inflection came from partnerships. Platforms including FreshBooks and GoFundMe used WePay underneath their own customer experiences. Aberman later said the channel business unexpectedly outperformed direct sales. By 2014 it generated more than half of revenue, leading the founders to discontinue a direct merchant product that was still profitable.^[5] That was a difficult but coherent choice: concentrate on the distribution channel where one integration could bring thousands of merchants.

Timeline

• 2008: Aberman and Clerico founded WePay.^[1]
• Summer 2009: WePay entered Y Combinator.^[1]
• 2010: GoingAsAGroup added group buying and social recruitment.^[6]
• 2012: WePay raised $10 million after $9.15 million across its first two rounds.^[8]
• 2013: Mobile invoicing brought payment requests to service providers' phones.^[7]
• 2014: Platform revenue passed half of the business and WePay committed to ending direct merchant sales.^[5]
• 2015: WePay raised a $40 million Series D and reported more than $1 billion processed.^[9]
• 2016: UK support launched for white-label platform clients.^[10]
• December 2017: JPMorgan Chase completed the acquisition.^[4]

What They Built

The mature WePay product was a multi-party payments layer for software platforms and marketplaces. A platform could onboard merchants, process payer charges, capture or release funds, handle refunds, assign beneficiary roles, send notifications, and enable withdrawals.^[11] WePay packaged payment processing together with fraud protection, compliance, and operational workflows that individual platforms did not want to build.

FreshBooks showed the benefit clearly. Its 2014 integration updated invoice status after payment and automatically recorded refunds and chargebacks inside the FreshBooks dashboard.^[12] Payment became part of the software workflow rather than a handoff to an unrelated processor.

The 2016 UK launch extended this white-label model internationally for clients including GoFundMe, FreshBooks, and Constant Contact while bundling fraud and compliance support.^[10] After acquisition, JPMorgan used WePay technology for QuickAccept, Canadian digital onboarding, automated know-your-customer work for third-party payment providers, and white-label processing for independent software vendors.^[4]